Successful
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search
engine optimization has become an increasing important part of the IT, sales or
marketing department’s role in most companies. To such a degree that some
companies employ people just to work on ensuring that they stay high in the
search engine listings. The art of SEO requires a lot of thought as to how you
want to be found, and a lot of hard work working on your pages to ensure they
are to the right requirement. For the purpose of this article we are going to
focus on Google SEO, but don’t forget there are other search engines to focus
on as well, such as Bing, Yahoo and others
Below
are 7 steps which if you follow should help get you on the road to improving
your SEO rating.
1)
Quality Content: Ensure the content represents what information you are trying
to get across on the page. You will see the phrase “Content is King” used on
all the SEO tips websites. Stay clear and concise with the content; do not veer
away from the main focus of the page.
2)
Titles: Make sure each page has a title that is relevant to the page. The
titles are what display in the top of the browser you use. Take the below
example from the BBC football transfers gossip section
Here
the page title is “BBC Sport – Thursdays gossip column: Football transfers
& Rumours”. This related directly to the content in the page, had the page
title just been “Football” it would not have had as much relevance.
3)
Use Meta tags: A Meta tag is another way of telling a search engine, what your
page is about by using descriptive and key words. Referring to the above
example see the below Meta tags used in the gossip page
<Meta
name="description" content="Real Madrid still confident of
landing Bale, Manchester United to offer £40m for Cesc Fabregas, plus
more." />
<meta
name="keywords" content="BBC, Sport, BBC Sport, bbc.co.uk,
world, uk, international, foreign, british, online, service" />
These tags are all in the code and are not visible in the page for
visitors to see
4) Label Images properly: If images are used in a page, then use a name
that relates to what is in the image and also give the image an alt tag. An alt
tag is the text that displays if you leave your mouse over the image. It is
firstly a way of letting the user know what should be there if the image
doesn’t load and secondly the search engine can read the alt tag and reference
it.
5) Updates: Keep your sites and pages updated. Don’t let content get old
or sterile. If something is out of date then remove it or replace it. As well
as this keep updating and adding new content to keep your site fresh.
6) Videos: use videos on your website to inform users of products or
services you offer. YouTube videos now come up in search listings so it gives you
another avenue to get people to visit your site and view your products/service
offerings.
7) Links: Use sensible link names, for example don’t just use click here
for a link to another page, use text that is relevant to that page you are
linking to. For example referencing the earlier BBC example, they could have a
link on another page that says For the Latest Transfer news from the entire
English league click here. To show what click here would link to, google click here. It takes you to the adobe reader page!
Staying with links, get other companies to link to your site from
theirs. For example if you have a trading partner or a supplier then they can
link to you and you could link to them, it all builds up the indexing done by Google.
These are just a few simple steps to help improve your Google rankings,
as mentioned earlier don’t forget about the other search engines, you may miss
possible customers by not submitting yourselves to those.
To find out how to submit your website to Google, Bing and yahoo click
on the respective links below:
To find out more about SEO then please view any of the following links:
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